Does music sound all the same nowadays? This article revives the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry by recontextualizing it within contemporary financialized platform capitalism. We argue that Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs) like Spotify showcase the proliferation of the future-oriented asset logic inherent to both financialization and platformization. This process intensifies the standardization of music that was first recognized by Theodor Adorno. The playlist is the central device of this assetization of music, contributing to a noticeable decrease in sonic and stylistic diversity in music. We illustrate this novel development through a diachronic content analysis of hip-hop music, comparing Apple Music’s Hip-Hop/R&B Hits: 2002 playlist based on hip-hop charts from the pre-DSP era and Spotify’s largest in-house curated playlist RapCaviar (from 2022). Rather than democratizing the music market, as Spotify is often hailed to do, the twenty-first-century culture industry facilitates further homogenization of artistic expression. Our findings contribute to ongoing political economy debates about the effects of financialization, platformization, and assetization on music, culture, and the everyday.

In a financialized world where we are all conscripted to be competitive players, the category of cheating takes on new political and cultural potency and has become key to reactionary ideology. This speculative essay moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, as well as beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery. By examining imperialism’s ‘Great Game’, the links between game theory and neoliberalism, and the role of recursive rule-breaking in the history of finance, we can triangulate the normalization of cheating within the dominant economic paradigm. This essay approaches cheating as a discursive formation entangled with financial power. Such an approach can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has introduced several policy measures to better align financial markets with sustainability goals. So far, these policies have mainly aimed to improve how information on the sustainability impacts of investments is collected and transmitted. Policymakers hope that adjustments to the epistemic infrastructure of financial markets will lead to a shift in investments that translates into transformational change in the real economy. The EU’s sustainable finance policies often follow a reflexive law approach and confine themselves to setting procedural and organisational norms. This article analyses the potential and limitations of this approach and argues that sustainable finance policies must be sufficiently detailed and binding to avoid the risk, associated with reflexive law policies, of granting too much discretion to agents with vested interests detrimental to the governance aims. However, detailed and binding policies do not fully realise the advantages in dealing with highly complex and dynamic situations that are often ascribed to reflexive law policies. While sustainable finance policies that address the epistemic infrastructure of financial markets are for various reasons still important, their potential and advantages compared to other governance approaches should not be exaggerated.

This article examines how the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, it shows that the absence of physical infrastructures and the dominance of virtual ones is not merely technical but an active condition that reshapes moral obligation, trust, and accountability in borrowing. Branchless fintech enables users, mostly Muslims, to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private acts beyond communal or religious scrutiny – a process conceptualised as financial secularisation. Yet the same absence generates mistrust as users perceive fintech as intangible and unreliable. The article also shows how the impersonal nature of fintech borrowing encourages default, which fintech companies counter through coercive digital enforcement. These dynamics reveal a dialectic of absence and presence: physical absence weakens moral accountability while hyper-visible digital oversight reinstates coercion. The article contributes to debates on credit-debt relations and infrastructure by showing how digital finance transforms moral economies in the global south and reshapes financial subjectivities.

The expanding application of financial technologies, as well as growing participation of consumer investors, has multiplied the forms and functions of finance, deepening its entanglement with social, political, and cultural processes. This interview responds to increasing interest within the journal’s community in the evolving intersections of finance, technology, and society. The conversation foregrounds the role of fintech – understood both narrowly as communication infrastructures and broadly as socio-technical environments – in reconfiguring these relationships. Also, by situating finance as an interdisciplinary pivot, the interview further highlights emerging research frontiers, including blockchain, venture capital, and the crypto economy, while also reflecting on the methodological challenges and academic struggles that accompany their study. Taken together, the discussion points toward an evolving research agenda across various relevant fields.

This essay coins and develops the concept of Longevity Capitalism, a biopolitical and financial regime in which both the condition of living longer and the pursuit of longevity are transformed into frontiers of accumulation. As financialisation extends into the domain of ageing, longevity – once a social and fiscal challenge – has been reframed as an investment opportunity. The essay traces a shift from collective welfare management to individualized risk-bearing, showing how uncertainty about life expectancy is converted into a new asset class. Drawing on examples such as financial instruments that profit from longevity risk, the rise of ‘age-tech’, and Silicon Valley’s ventures in life extension, it shows how biological time is increasingly treated as an economic resource. It also examines the speculative pursuit of ‘longevity escape velocity’, where technological innovation is imagined to outpace ageing and death itself becomes a technical problem. Together, these developments reveal a system in which longer life functions as a perpetually deferred investment cycle – an economy sustained by its own postponement. The essay argues that economic and biological time, wealth and health, are now fused within a single regime of managed futurity, reflecting new forms of power over who – and how – gets to live longer.

Modern monetary theory (MMT) argues that all governments that issue their own currency have the same fiscal and monetary policy space. This paper argues against this position. For MMT’s assumptions to be valid, MMT must abstract from the gravitational force of the US dollar that stems from it being backed by a mass of securities – an influence transmitted through international investment flows. Once the dollar’s gravitational force is recognised, it becomes clear that the huge size disparity separating the US financial market from those of other markets, and most notably those of the emerging market economies (EMEs), translates into an equally huge disparity regarding fiscal and monetary policy capacities. The strategic implications of recognising this disparity are that EME governments should, where possible, join their financial markets into regional blocs of sufficient size to give their regional currencies enough backing mass to allow them to resist the gravitational pull of the dollar. Only by pooling their currency sovereignty can EME governments retain some scope for pursuing macroeconomic policies independently of those pursued by the US government. Without doing so, if EME governments in countries with small financial markets follow MMT’s advice to retain their local currencies, this will condemn these currencies to entrapment in the dollar’s gravitational field and possibly outright dollar colonisation.